Business services are a set of intangible activities that do not deliver a tangible product and work as a support system for other businesses to achieve their objectives. They range from basic utilities such as electricity and water to consulting services offered by investment banks regarding business financing and top level strategy such as mergers. Business service offerings can be delivered in person at a company’s headquarters or remotely using the internet.
The industry that provides business services is enormous and includes almost every type of activity a company might need to function. A few major subsets include the information technology (IT) industry, which supports a firm’s computer systems and networks. The finance industry handles the firm’s accounting, taxes, payroll and investments. The supply chain industry ensures a firm has the necessary materials for production. The IT and finance industries are supported by the administrative services industry, which helps companies operate their business.
A company can offer any number of business services, depending on its business model and the needs of its clients. Some of the most common examples are consulting and advisory services provided by investment banks, IT service providers offering software as a service, and management and administration firms. These firms typically charge for their business services based on the scope of work and the client’s needs.
How to identify business services
The scholarly literature on the subject of identifying business services reveals a multitude of methods for examining a firm’s service provisioning issues [1]. A key feature of these approaches is the recognition that business services are engineering artifacts, and they are defined by a set of design concerns specific to their context of use.
Therefore, a BSIM that is driven by both a complete and refined set of business service concerns, as well as the contemporary business perspective, is needed to address these problems effectively. The purpose of this article is to present a new method for identifying business services that addresses these needs.
This new approach builds on carefully selected chunks of existing method designs each adhering to a concern affiliated with the business service concept. The result is a methodology for recognizing and defining business services that better leverages this powerful abstraction. In addition, this approach is more consistent with the contemporary perspective of markets that is rooted in Service-Dominant (S-D) logic.
Using this methodology, a business service catalog can be built that contains the full set of business services provided by an organization. This can then be used to support business and IT alignment throughout the enterprise by connecting application services and CIs with business service offerings in a way that is meaningful to the business. The resulting catalog can also be used to improve the Employee Experience by subscribing users to only the business services that are relevant to them. By providing a personalized and customized view of business service offerings, this will allow them to become more valuable to the end user.